I’m reading this new book. I’m interested in how the conservative thinker James J. Kilpatrick, as much as possible, made the case for racial segregation without talking about race. Regnery published Kilpatrick’s first book, The Sovereign States in 1956.
From page 68 of William P. Hustwit’s biography of Kilpatrick:
Protecting southern values and traditions served one purpose of The Sovereign States, but it also became the book’s drawback. Although the published version of The Sovereign States came closer to diminishing race as a factor in the school controversy than the original draft, it made the kind of racial arguments that hampered the South’s case with the rest of the country. Initially, Kilpatrick intended to present a case for the South in the last section of The Sovereign States. He portrayed southerners as a people with sophisticated constitutional ideas, but he also devoted seventeen pages to the deficiencies of Negroes as a race. In the final adaptation, only two pages mentioned the inferiority of African Americans. One of Regnery’s editors, Charles Lee, convinced Kilpatrick to reduce statistics on blacks’ illegitimate births, illiteracy, and venereal diseases. The original manuscript contained a chapter called “On the Merits” that introduced a number of sociological, psychological, and anthropological arguments against blacks as well. Regnery’s staff seemed more racially sensitive than Kilpatrick, and the content on African Americans nearly disappeared from the book…
“The experience of generations has demonstrated that in the south (whatever may be true of the Negro in urban areas of the North and West) the Negro race, as a race, has palpably different social, moral, and behavioral standards from those which obtain among the white race,” he scoffed. African Americans corroded civilization through their venereal diseases, marital infidelity, and ignorance, which could hinder white children’s educations in mixed schools.
